For those who don't want to read an entire article; I'd just like to publicly
call out the blatant hypocisy of Let's Encrypt here:

They deny their users the ability to request wildcard certificates; yet enjoy
using wildcards on their parent site, eff.org

They deny their users the ability to request certificates that last longer than
three months, yet their very own letsencrypt.org website uses a certificate with
a three year validity length!

If they want to tell all their users how to run their sites, then they should
lead by example and give up these luxuries themselves.

New servers; SSL/HTTPS support; IPv6 support2016-09-17

The old byuu.org has been replaced with two new servers. The forum now runs on
its own separate server. In order for the SSL certificate to work across both;
I had to use A/AAAA records to point board.byuu.org at the secondary server.

With the server move from New Jersey to Chicago, IPv6 support has begun working
once again.

For anyone who has been following my progress for the past two weeks; I have
been trying my best to find a solution to avoid paying for an SSL certificate:
not because I couldn't afford it, but because security should not cost money.

Unfortunately, there are only two free options: StartSSL, which won't cover
subdomains at all (a complete non-starter); and Let's Encrypt, a hypocritical
joke of a service.

I'll write more on this topic at a later date, but for now — and against my
strongest moral objections — I gave in and paid for an SSL certificate. Since it
is recognized by all browsers, I went ahead and made HTTP automatically redirect
to the HTTPS version of the site.

Sega Mega Drive (Sega Genesis) emulation2016-08-21

On July 8th, I started on a Sega Mega Drive emulation core.

As of today, it's finally able to run its first game with no visible issues
other than a lack of audio emulation. Yay!

Still, it's going to be a long haul to get this core to be of high quality: the
Mega Drive is roughly on par with the SNES in terms of technical complexity when
it comes to aiming for extreme accuracy.

I'm not sure when it will appear in official releases.

higan v101 released — back to basics2016-08-08

Not a large changelog this time, sorry. This release is mostly to fix the SA-1
issue, and to get some real-world testing of the new scheduler model. Most of
the work in the past month has gone into writing a 68000 CPU core; yet it's
still only about half-way finished.

Also, I've added a new tutorial page for higan, concerning firmware and its
usage. This is made needlessly difficult right now due to the distribution
methods used today. I implore the No-Intro team to please reconsider their
position on firmware for the sake of making preservation more complete, and
accurate SNES emulation easier for everyone.

Added a meta viewport tag, so the site should be a lot more readable on mobile
now. Site works best in landscape mode due to the navigation bar and the size of
some of the images. I'll look into improving things more in the future.

Article: Emulator Latency2016-08-03

I've finally taken the time to write up a definitive guide to my thoughts on
the causes of and limited workarounds to emulator latency. You can read it here:

I feel it's important to stress right away that this is not "version 1.00", nor
is it a major milestone release. Rather than arbitrary version numbers, all of
my software simply bumps version numbers by one for each official release. As
such, higan v100 is simply higan's 100th release.

That said, the primary focus of this release has been code clean-ups. These are
always somewhat dangerous in that regressions are possible. We've tested through
sixteen WIP revisions, one of which was open to the public, to try and minimize
any regressions. But all the same, please report any regressions if you discover
any.

tomoko: synchronize video removed from UI; still available in the settings file

tomoko, icarus: can navigate to root drive selection on Windows

all: major code cleanups and refactoring (~1MB diff against v099)

Note 1: the audio volume change means that SGB and MSU1 games won't lose half
the volume on the SNES sounds anymore. However, if one goes overboard and drives
the sound all the way to max volume with the MSU1, clamping may occur. The
obvious solution is not to drive volume that high (it will vastly overpower the
SNES audio, which usually never exceeds 25% volume.) Another option is to lower
the volume in the audio settings panel to 50%. In general, neither is likely to
ever be necessary.

Note 2: the synchronize video option was hidden from the UI because it is no
longer useful. With the advent of compositors, the loss of the complicated
timing settings panel, support for the WonderSwan and its 75hz display, the need
to emulate variable refresh rate behaviors in the Game Boy, the unfortunate
latency spike and audio distortion caused by long Vsync pauses, and the arrival
of adaptive sync technology ... it no longer makes sense to present this option.
However, as stated, you can edit settings.bml to enable this option anyway if
you insist and understand the aforementioned risks.

Time for a new release. There are a few important emulation improvements and a
few new features; but for the most part, this release focuses on major code
refactoring, the details of which I will mostly spare you.

The major change is that, as of v099, the SNES balanced and performance cores
have been removed from higan. Basically, in addition to my five other emulation
cores, these were too much of a burden to maintain. And they've come along as
far as I was able to develop them. If you need to use these cores, please use
these two from the v098 release.

I'm very well aware that ~80% of the people using higan for SNES emulation were
using the two removed profiles. But they simply had to go. Hopefully in the
future, we can compensate for their loss by increasing the performance of the
accuracy core.

If you want to know more about the removal of these two profiles, please read
this article for a more in-depth explanation.

Changelog:

SFC: balanced profile removed

SFC: performance profile removed

SFC: expansion port devices can now be changed during gameplay (atlhough you shouldn't)

This release adds WonderSwan, WonderSwan Color and SwanCrystal emulation. Note
that the SwanCrystal is 99.9% identical to the WonderSwan Color sans the LCD
panel type; thus going forward I won't be including it in the list of emulated
systems.

Please note that this will be the final higan release to include the balanced
and performance cores. The accuracy core has now become the only core used by
higan.

Furthermore, to simplify naming, the internal emulation cores are now nameless.
This means bnes, bsnes, bgb, bgba and bws are now all just part of higan. loki
is thus both a subset (the SNES core alone) and superset (with added debugging
capabilities) of higan. The internal names were meaningless anyway, as they were
never exposed anywhere except one line in each core's source code.

This release features improvements to all emulation cores, but most
substantially for the Game Boy core. All of blargg's test ROMs that pass in
gambatte now either pass in higan, or are off by 1-2 clocks (the actual
behaviors are fully emulated.) I consider the Game Boy core to now be fairly
accurate, but there's still more improvements to be had.

Also, what's sure to be a major feature for some: higan now has full support for
loading and playing ordinary ROM files, whether they have copier headers, weird
extensions, or are inside compressed archives. You can load these games from
the command-line, from the main Library menu (via Load ROM Image), or via
drag-and-drop on the main higan window. Of course, fans of game folders and the
library need not worry: that's still there as well.

Also new, you can drop the (uncompressed) Game Boy Advance BIOS onto the higan
main window to install it into the correct location with the correct file name.

Lastly, this release technically restores Mac OS X support. However, it's still
not very stable, so I have decided against releasing binaries at this time. I'd
rather not rush this and leave a bad first impression for OS X users.

I've put up a page with a list of SNES-related items that I need help obtaining.
I'm not strictly seeking donations, I am looking to pay full market value to
buy, or to cover shipping simply to borrow, many items for a very short while.

If anyone could help, it would be highly appreciated, and I'd be happy to try
and return the favor in any way that I could.

As long-time readers will know, the $600 Mac Mini I purchased in 2011 died
completely within a year on me. And at that time, the OS X ports of my software
came to a halt. I was (and still am) unwilling to purchase any future Apple
products due to this.

However, I held no objections to a donation, but didn't consider it likely that
such an event would ever occur. Needless to say, I am very pleasantly surprised!

As such, I will be spending the next few months working on the hiro/Cocoa port,
so that my software such as higan can once again be compiled and run natively on
OS X. Look forward to more news on that in the future.

Many thanks again to Kevin!

higan v096 released2015-12-21

This release adds many UI refinements, new features, and GBA emulation
improvements.

I'm looking for Super Famicom console donations, so that I can include hardware
PCB scans and document differences for my SNES preservation efforts. If anyone
would be interested in helping, I'd be very grateful. More about this
here.

Also, I've attempted to add a WASAPI audio driver for the Windows port, but I'm
having trouble getting it stable. If there are any WASAPI experts that could
lend a hand there, that would also be very helpful!

The most notable feature is vastly improved Game Boy Advance emulation. With
many thanks to endrift, Cydrak, Jonas Quinn and jchadwick, this release contains
substantially improved CPU timings and many bugfixes. Being one of only two GBA
emulators to offer ROM prefetch emulation, higan is very near mGBA in terms of
accuracy, and far ahead of all others. As a result of these fixes, compatibility
is also much higher than in v094.

There are also several improvements to SNES emulation. Most significantly is
support for mid-scanline changes to the background mode in the accuracy profile.

Due to substantial changes to the user interface library used by higan, this
release features yet again a brand-new UI. With the exception of video shaders
and NSS DIP switch selection, it is at feature-parity with the previous UI. It
also offers some new features that v094 lacked.

The cheat code database has also been updated to the latest version by mightymo.

Lastly, I will not be offering official 32-bit Windows binaries going forward.
higan will technically build and run on 32-bit systems, but I am tired of having
to jump through flaming hoops to update MinGW32's headers that haven't been
updated since 1996. The 10% performance hit for running in 32-bit mode is also
a significant deterrent. If anyone wants to take over 32-bit Windows builds,
I'll happily link them from the higan downloads page.

Note: I'm working on a new user guide to explain how to use higan and icarus. So
if you have trouble using this release, check back here in a few days please.
But essentially, you run icarus to import your games, and then higan to play
them. It's a bit different from the direct integration of ananke with v094.